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Historical Sketch 



o^ 



CAMDEN, N. J. 



HOWARD M. COOPER 



A revision and amplification of a paper read before the 
Camden County Historical Society, Jime 13, 1899 



With an Introduction by 

Hon. CHARLES VAN DYKE JOUNE 



Camden, N. J.: 

HORACE B. KETlvER 

1909 






Copyrighted 1908 and 1909 
by 
Horace B. Ketler 



Cla. A, 2 ^ 4 5 31 
AUG 4 1909 



Printed by 
SiNNiCKtoN Chkw & Sons Co. 
Camden, N. J. 



Illustrations by 

Spencer G. Easton, 

Camden, N. J. 



^ntrolruttion 



If one were to seek the genesis of Camden 
he would not find it in the visit of the sturdy 
Dutchman, DeVries, nor of any explorer who 
followed, nor in the voyages of those in search 
of a land where they might increase their 
wordly possessions, but rather would he find 
it in souls devoted to principle, and primed 
with courage never to yield ; in a quiet contest 
for right and equality, which knew no sub- 
mission. 

In one of his stories Robert Louis Stevenson 
tells of a rider issuing from a forest upon the 
high road and gazing upon it as it runs down 
hill before him, joining road after road, skirt- 
ing the sea and passing through city after city 
to the farthest end of Europe. May we not 
picture some such person, some one denied 
that which he conceived to be right and de- 
termined to seek a refuge elsewhere, looking 
out upon the high road, and meditating upon 
where it will lead him. As it reaches from 
him it skirts the seashore, and suddenly melts 
away and is lost to sight, for it has taken its 
course across the "deep, dark, blue ocean" 
leading to a spot upon the banks of the Dela- 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

ware, and there ending in the founding of a 
home in another dime and upon alien soil. 

Thus it was that William Cooper, leaving 
his native land and tarrying for nearly a year 
at Burlington, came to Camden about 1680, 
where he built a home at Pyne Poynte. 

Ruskin asserts that "all the pure and noble 
arts of peace are founded on war," and that 
"it is the foundation of all the high virtues and 
faculties of man." This may or may not be 
true, but it may fairly be said that all great 
results proceed from contest and struggle and 
it may as fairly be said that to contest and 
struggle, not of deeds of arms, but for the 
maintenance of rights, may we trace the begin- 
ning of our city. Though this be true, still its 
inception was as peaceful as is the bosom of the 
river which flows past its door. 

At this point I am tempted, in a few bold 
strokes, to tell of the evolution of the wilder- 
ness into a city, of the felling of the primeval 
forest, of the growth of roads and streets from 
little pathways, of the founding of new homes, 
the advent of new faces, and of the innumer- 
able things which gradually but surely alter 
the face of the land, but were I to attempt it 
I fear that the good people who have the 
courage to read this introduction would accuse 
me of theft of the idea from Hawthorne's 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

charming story "Main Street," of the facts 
from Mr. Cooper's delightful and instructive 
sketch. 

A descendant of the Wilham Cooper above 
referred to, Mr. Howard M. Cooper, has given 
to the citizens of Camden a work of great 
value, for in it he has recorded many facts 
known to few besides himself and it suggests 
the following thought: We now have daily 
papers giving the current life of our city, but 
there is much that rests alone in the memory of 
our citizens that should be saved for the future 
historian. In Holland there are public archives 
where historic facts may be preserved. It 
surely would be of value for such a depository 
to be established in one of our public libraries. 
Encouragement should then be given to our 
citizens to reduce to writing their recollections 
of past and present events, and, being safely 
kept where access could be had to them at all 
times, who can tell but that they might be an 
inspiration to some one in the future to con- 
tinue the labor of love and affection so admir- 
ably begun by Mr. Cooper. 

January 22, 1909. 

Charles Van Dyke Joune. 




LORD CAMDEN 



Ci^aptcr I 

In 1618 Lord De La Warr, sailing along 
the Atlantic coast on his return to Virginia 
from England, died at sea opposite the mouth 
of "a goodly and noble river," which, as a 
perpetual monument to his memory, forever 
indicating the place of his death, was thence 
called the Delaware/ Sailing up this wide river 
in 1 63 1, noting the creeks and estuaries empty- 
ing into it, the Dutch commander, De Vries, 
discovered about one hundred miles from 
its mouth, on the eastern shore, a large 
thickly wooded island, which he called Jacques 
Eylandt. The Swedes, coming some seven or 
eight years after, observing the same isle, with 
much better taste called it by its Indian name, 
Aquikanasra, an island destined to be, a 
century and a half later, the site of the town 
of Camden. By the concurrent testimony of 
the early Dutch and Swedish writers it was 
bounded on the west and north by the Dela- 
ware; on the east by what the Indians called 
the Asoroches river, the Dutch the Timmerkill, 
the Swedes the Hiorte-Kilen — our Cooper's 
creek ; and on the south by the Quinquorenning 
of the Indians, the Graef Ernest of the Dutch 
— our Newton creek.' 

Whether these early historians were abso- 
lutely correct in their geography or not, it will 
not seem impossible that the waters of Cooper's 
Creek once had an outlet into Newton Creek 

1 Barker's Sketches, 14; Smith's Hist. Va., 148. 

2 Lindstrom's Map, Vol. 9, p. 19, N. J, Hist. Soc. 



8 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

to any one who will carefully observe the 
topography of the land along the Haddon- 
field turnpike about where the White Horse 
road branches off, and note on the one hand the 
ravine across Harleigh Cemetery, that, even 
now, when its upper end has been filled for a 
roadway, puts up almost to the turnpike, and 
a little beyond, on the other hand, winding 
through the low land skirting the road, the 
small rivulet that is the head of the north 
branch of Newton Creek, with only the narrow 
water-shed along which the Haddonfield turn- 
pike runs, dividing them. Seeing this, and 
recollecting how universally the cutting off the 
forests lessens the rainfall and diminishes the 
streams, the observer will hesitate before accus- 
ing the early Dutch and Swedish discoverers 
of anticipating Munchausen. 

Though they explored, neither the Dutch 
nor the Swedes settled here where the 
Maeroahkong tribe of the Delaware Indians 
lived, as their fathers had before them, undis- 
turbed by the fact that across the great water 
an humble shepherd, aroused by the light within 
him to God's call, was preaching the absolute 
equality of man, and the entire peaceableness 
of God's Kingdom, and was drawing down 
upon himself and upon those whose consciences, 
awakened by his calls, were in numbers joining 
him, the oppression and the ire of those who 
profited by caste and lived by the sword. Until 
persecution in England drove the Friends to 
West Jersey for asylum, these Indians, under 
Arasapha, their king, with their village at 



OP CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 9 

Cooper's Pointy, were the only inhabitants 
within our Hmits. 

Who first of the Enghsh emigrants made 
the future Camden his home is uncertain, but 
it was probably Richard Arnold or William 
Cooper. Few traces remain of Richard Arnold, 
who seems to have left no descendants in these 
parts. William Cooper, ancestor of many 
families that still cluster about his choice of a 
home, came from England in 1679 and stopped 
for about a year at Burlington, before he chose 
his permanent residence. Passing up and down 
the Delaware, the bold bluff, heavily wooded 
with pine timber at the point where the river, 
sharply curving, receives the stream called by 
the Swedes the Hiorte-Kilen, or Deer Creek, 
from the many deer seen along its banks, and 
along which grew "peach trees and the sweet 
smelling sassafras tree," striking his fancy, he 
fixed upon it as his future abode, and called it 
"Pyne Poynte." His name, however, soon 
attached itself permanently to both point and 
creek. He located at Cooper's Point in the 
spring of 1681, building his house well out on 
the river's edge, just below the mouth of the 
creek, a site long years ago washed away by 
the encroaching tide. 

Recognizing the brotherhood of the Indians 
and their right to the soil that they and their 
fathers hunted over and possessed undisputed, 
the commissioners sent over by the proprietors 
of West Jersey bought of them their right from 
Oldman's Creek to Assunpink, securing their 
title by three deeds, the earliest of which, dated 



10 HISTORICAIv SKETCH 

September loth, 1677, covered Camden's terri- 
tory, and extended from Timber to Rancocas 
Creek/ William Cooper, further to satisfy the 
tribe at Cooper's Point, paid them for the right 
they still claimed, and received from them a 
deed executed by Tallacca, their chief, and 
witnessed by several of their tribe. Returning 
the red man's trust and friendlessness with hon- 
esty and fair dealing, Camden's early settlers 
found them always friends, and no tales of 
Indian massacre blot her history. 

Thus was commenced, at the very outset, 
that never-varying policy of justness in all her 
dealings with the Indians that has given to our 
fair State such enviable and exceptional fame, 
enabling Samuel L. Southard eloquently to 
say : "It is a proud fact in the history of New 
Jersey, that every part of her soil has been 
obtained from the Indians by fair and volun- 
tary purchase and transfer, a fact that no other 
State in the Union, not even the land which 
bears the name of Penn, can boast of." 

Before the settlement of our overshadowing 
neighbor of Brotherly Love, a few other scat- 
tering Friends, following William Cooper, 
began to locate in the neighborhood of his 
home; and as they had braved the perils of 
the ocean and of the wilderness, and tore them- 
selves away from all ties of home, kindred and 
early associations, for the boon of worshipping 
God uninterruptedly in the way that to them 
seemed right, they immediately, though but two 
or three gathered in His name, opened a meet- 

I Howe's Hist. Coll'n, pp. 21, 220. 



01^ CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. II 

ing for His worship, the first record of which 
is this minute of the Monthly Meeting held at 
Thomas Gardiner's house, Burlington, Seventh 
month (September) 5th, 1681 : "Ordered that 
Friends of Pyne Poynte have a meeting on 
every Fourth day, and to begin at the second 
hour, at Richard Arnold's house." Arnold's 
house stood, as shown on Thomas Sharp's map 
of A. D. 1700, a short distance above the mouth 
of Newton Creek, and thus, within its log 
walls, at the very beginning of the settlement, 
was the first of Camden's ever widening circle 
of churches established. It was the only 
"meeting" between Salem and Burlington, and 
the third in priority in West Jersey, and has 
been kept up by Friends without a lapse from 
that time to the present. 

Shortly afterward the meeting was held at 
Pyne Poynte, at the house of William Cooper, 
a minister, and continued there until the arrival 
of the "Irish Friends," who settled at Newton 
in the spring of 1682, when, as Thomas Sharp, 
their historian, quaintly says, "Immediately 
there was a meeting sett up and kept at the 
house of Mark Newbie, and in a short time 
it grew and increased, unto which William 
Cooper and family, that live at the Poynte, re- 
sorted, and sometimes the meeting was kept at 
his house, who had been settled sometime 
before." 

But as the Newton Friends were much more 
numerous than the fev/ scattered families about 
the Poynte, it was more convenient to most of 
the members for the place of worship to be 



12 HISTORICAL SKE;TCH 

located at their settlement; and in 1684 the 
first building devoted to religious meetings in 
Gloucester county was built on the middle 
branch of Newton Creek, at what is now West 
Collingswood Station, on the Reading Rail- 
road to Atlantic City. It, and the graveyard 
by its side, were placed on the bank of the 
stream, the only available highway in those 
days of roadless forests, when the water bore 
alike the halcyon voyages of youth, the grave 
worshippers and the solemn funeral train. 

By 1686 quite a number of emigrants had 
arrived in this part of West Jersey and settled 
about Red Bank, Woodbury, Arwames or 
Gloucester, Newton and the Poynte, and felt 
strongly the inconvenience of having to go all 
the way to Salem or Burlington to transact 
their public business. Accordingly, on the 26th 
of May, 1686, the proprietors, freeholders and 
inhabitants of the "Third and Fourth Tenths," 
that is, the territory between Pensauken and 
Oldman's Creek, acting in the spirit of pure 
democracy, met at Arwames and formed that 
quaintly curious frame of county government, 
having only ten short paragraphs, that is still 
preserved in the original book of minutes, in 
the Clerk's office of Gloucester county, at 
Woodbury. 

"This was the origin of Old Gloucester, the 
only county in New Jersey that can deduce its 
existence from a direct and positive compact 
between her inhabitants.'" 

I Mickle's Reminiscences, p.' 35. 



OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 1 3 

The action of the people in thus forming 
their county organization, without any author- 
ity of the Legislature, was, after having been 
indirectly recognized in one or two other laws, 
directly sanctioned, in 1694, by an act of the 
Legislature, establishing the boundaries that 
they had themselves chosen, and adopting their 
title of the County of Gloucester. 

The courts of the county so organized met 
for ten years in taverns or in private houses, 
sometimes at Red Bank and sometimes at 
Arwames. At the latter place, on December 
2d, 1689, they ordered "a goale or logg house 
for the securing of prisoners,'" to be built. 
And on June ist, 1696, they ordered "a prison 
twenty foot long and sixteen wide, of a suffi- 
sient heighth and strength made of loggs to 
be erected and builded at Gloucester — with a 
Court House over ye same of convenient 
heighth and largeness." The first of the series 
of court houses that has culminated in Cam- 
den's noble one of to-day. 

A vivid reminder that the barbarous criminal 
punishments of England of the seventeenth 
century were not left behind them by the emi- 
grants to New Jersey is found in the minute 
of that Court, of March ist, 1691, that a man 
was found guilty of perjury and sentenced by 
the jury "to pay twenty pounds fine or stand 
in ye pillory one hour. To which ye bench 
assents, and ye prisoner chusing to stand in ye 
pillory they award and order the same to be 
in Gloucester on ye twelfth day of April next, 

I Mickle, p. 37. 



14 HISTORICAI, SKETCH 

between ye hours of ten in ye morning and 
four in ye afternoon." Equally striking is the 
minute of a little later date that, "It is agreed 
by this meeting that a payor of substantial 
stocks be erected near the prison with a post 
at each end, well fixed and fastened with a 
hand cuff iron att one of them for a whipping 
post." 

The necessity of a regular ferry to Philadel- 
phia being very soon felt by the new settlers, 
they applied to their new Court, at Gloucester, 
to license one, which on the first day of First 
month, (March) 1687, it did, as appears by 
this minute : "It is proposed to ye Bench y-t 
a fferry is very need full and much wanted from 
Jersey to Philadelphia, and y-t William Roy- 
den's house is look-t upon as a place con- 
venient, and the said William Royden, a per- 
son suitable for that imploy, and therefore an 
order desired from ye Bench that a fferry may 
be there fixed, &c., to which ye Bench assents 
and refer to ye grand jury to methodize ye 
same and fix ye rates thereof." This they pro- 
ceeded to do in a very leisurely manner, for not 
until one year afterw'ards, on the first day of 
the First month, 1688, did they issue their 
license to William Royden and his assigns, 
permitting and appointing "that a common 
passage or ferry for man and beast be pro- 
vided, fixed and settled in some convenient and 
proper place between ye mouths or entrances of 
Cooper's Creek and Newton Creek," within 
which limits "all other persons are desired and 
requested to keep no other common or public 



OF camdi;n, ne:w jersey. 15 

passage or ferry." The license also fixed the 
ferriag-e at not more than 6d. per head, for each 
person, and I2d. for man and horse or other 
beast, except swine, calves and sheep, "which 
shall pay only six pence per head and no 
more." 

Thus was established the original of our 
present ample ferry facilities. It was located 
near the foot of Cooper street, its boats being 
open flat-boats propelled by oars or sails. A 
few years afterwards it was purchased by 
William Cooper, and for more than one hun- 
dred years thereafter Camden was everywhere 
known as Cooper's Ferries. To-day our Roy- 
den street perpetuates the memory of Camden's 
first ferryman. 

Cooper's Creek was much too great a river 
to ford, so that Samuel Spicer, who lived on 
its east side, near its mouth, established a ferry 
across it, at what is now Federal street, that 
was maintained until the year 1747, when the 
first bridge was erected. Thus, with ferries 
across the western and eastern boundaries of 
the island of Aquikanasra. its inhabitants 
were in full touch with their neighbors. From 
that island to-day, five steam ferries cross the 
Delaware to Philadelphia and four bridges 
span Cooper's Creek. Who can say that the 
much-talked-of tunnel under the Delaware may 
not soon more closely unite the tv^nn cities on 
its shores? 

The establishment of the county only sup- 
plied a part of the necessary political ma- 
chinery, and so on the first day of June, 1695, 



l6 HISTORICAIv SKETCH 

the Grand Jury, with the assent of the Bench, 
and in accordance with an act of the then last 
Assembly, constituted the constablewick or 
township of Newton to extend from "the 
lowermost branch of Cooper's Creek to ye 
southerly branch of Newton Creek bounding 
Gloucester," but fixing no bounds on the east. 
With their local government thus completed, 
the people in these parts remained content for 
one hundred and thirty-three years. Thus was 
created old Newton township, which, after 
having its fairest portion cut off in the creation 
of Haddon township, was finally, after a life 
of one hundred and seventy-six years, swal- 
lowed up by its own progeny and obliterated 
from the map in 1871, when Camden's revised 
charter was obtained. 

Robert Turner, an Irish Friend, residing in 
Philadelphia, owned large estates in Pennsyl- 
vania and in East and West Jersey, among 
which were some large tracts of land within 
the present limits of Camden. In 1696 he 
sold to John Kaighin four hundred and fifty- 
five acres, and the next year five hundred and 
ten acres, lower down the river, to Archibald 
Mickle. John Kaighin came originally from 
the Isle of Man and Archibald Mickle from 
Ireland. Both settled for a short time in Phil- 
adelphia, but each moved to Jersey on making 
these purchases. John Kaighin chose for the 
site of his house the Point that bears his name 
to this day, and shortly afterwards built, with 
bricks brought from England, a substantial 
house, modeled after an English farm house 



O^ CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 1/ 

which, standing at the southeast corner of 
Second and Sycamore streets, but so greatly 
enlarged and changed as to have lost all its 
original appearance, and now numbered 1128 
and 1 130 South Second street, is probably the 
oldest house in Camden. Its site on the river 
bank, its front yard extending to the water's 
edge, was a beautiful one, with its un- 
obstructed view at the Point up and down the 
broad Delaware. Elizabeth Haddon, a good 
friend of John Kaighin, about the year 1704, 
on her return from one of her visits to her 
old English home, brought with her some box 
and yew trees and gave two of each to him, 
who planted them in front of his house, where 
they lived and grew for nearly two hundred 
years, landmarks of Kaighn's Point. The last 
of the box trees was blown over during a great 
storm, on February 2, 1876. The yew trees 
lived until the winter of 1898-99 when they 
died, but one of them yet stands at the corner 
of the two streets. At Haddonfield, in the 
yard of Samuel Wood, near his dwelling, 
which stands on the site of Elizabeth Haddon's 
home, yet live yew and box trees which she 
brought to America with those she gave to 
John Kaighin. 

William Cooper, John Kaighin and Archi- 
bald Mickle soon became prominent men, and 
their descendants gradually increased their pos- 
sessions until they owned all the land within 
the limits of our city before its absorption of 
the town of Stockton. The Coopers' land, 
extending southward to Line street, so-called 



i8 HISTORICAL ske;tch 

because it marked the line between them 
and the Kaighins; the Kaighins' land extend- 
ing southward from Line street to Little New- 
ton Creek, popularly known as the Line Ditch, 
because it was the boundary between them 
and the Mickles; and the Mickles' land ex- 
tending southward from Line Ditch to Newton 
Creek, and every title in Camden to-day, be- 
tween Cooper's Creek and the Delaware, can 
be traced back to a Mickle, a Kaighin or a 
Cooper. 

At the opening of the Eighteenth century 
the smoke curling from less than a dozen clear- 
ings by the water's edge pointed out the fore- 
runners more than two centuries ago of our 
present expanding town. A score of years of 
hard work had passed since they landed; they 
had gathered about them some few of the com- 
forts they had left behind across the seas ; they 
had "sett upp" the meeting for the free worship 
of God that caused them to leave friends and 
relations and "transport themselves and fam- 
ilys into this wilderness part of America"; 
they had established ferry communication with 
their friends across Delaware river and 
Cooper's creek; they had settled their free 
form of local civil government, and, having 
recognized the right of the aborigines to the 
soil and treated them as its owners, they were 
living in most harmonious relations with them, 
and, gradually increasing their clearings, they 
were quietly prospering. Their growth was 
only the steady increase of an industrious pop- 
ulation. For, after the arrival and settlement 



OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 1 9 

of the Irish Friends at Newton, there was no 
great influx of emigrants to this part of West 
Jersey, Philadelphia attracting the greater part 
of the new-comers. Occasionally a family 
would move across the river, but down to the 
time of the Revolution the population was 
mainly the descendants of those who were 
swept over here on that swell of migration 
caused by religious persecution in England in 
the Seventeenth century, so that when the 
Declaration of Independence had been made, 
while Philadelphia had become the first town 
in the colonies, our territory was yet largely 
woodland, dotted by a few farm houses and 
intersected by but one or two roads. 

However, in 1773, Jacob Cooper, a merchant 
living in Philadelphia, and a lineal descendant 
of the first William Cooper, foreseeing the 
future town, employed Thompson, a Philadel- 
phia surveyor, to lay out forty acres into a 
town plot. A Whig, sympathizing with his 
fellow Whigs in their struggles to obtain from 
their mother country that representation 
which they claimed should ever accompany 
taxation, and venerating those Englishmen 
who, believing in the justness of this demand 
of the colonies, had the courage to openly avow 
their belief, Jacob Cooper named his new town 
Camden, in honor of that great English judge, 
that wise English statesman, that powerful 
champion of constitutional liberty and firm ad- 
vocate of fair dealing with the colonies, who 
has been called the right arm of Lord Chatham, 
Charles Pratt, first Earl of Camden, who so 



20 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

endeared himself to our countrymen that twen- 
ty-one towns in the United States to-day bear 
his name. In the infant town thus christened 
only six streets ran north and south — King, 
Queen, Whitehall, Cherry, Cedar and Pine, in- 
tersected at right angles at the Delaware side 
by Cooper and Market streets only, but on the 
eastern side by Plum street also. 

With that same admixture of loyalty and 
defiance so marked in almost all the earlier 
steps taken by our Revolutionary forefathers, 
while naming his town after one of the fore- 
most champions of the American cause in Eng- 
land, Jacob Cooper honored his King and 
Queen in the naming of his streets, and 
through all the bitter feeling engendered by 
our two struggles with the mother country 
his nomenclature remained unchanged. It was 
not until May 24th, 1832, that adopting a new 
system, by ordinance of Council, King, Queen, 
Whitehall, Cherry, Cedar and Pine became 
Front, Second, Third, Fourth. Fifth and Sixth 
streets. But it was left until the days of pre- 
tentious change that, in the very mockery of 
old associations, on Camden's one hundredth 
anniversary, time-honored Plum was dropped 
for meaningless Arch. 

Almost immediately after Camden was 
planned the Revolution broke out and the 
struggle for independence and existence as a 
free people absorbing all other energies, scarce- 
ly a thing was done to promote the growth of 
the little town whose birth was so unheralded. 



OF CAMDE;N, new jersey. 21 

■ During the whole of the occupation of Phila- 
delphia by the British, Cooper's Point was held 
by them as an outpost, General Abercrombie 
having his headquarters in the old gambrel- 
roofed farm house, still standing at the head 
of Point street, with the stone in which is cut 
the date of its erection, 1734, still in place in 
its gable end, while an English and several 
Scotch and Hessian regiments were quartered 
at the old ferry house, at the foot of Cooper 
street, torn down in 1882. The British lines 
extended along the river front from Cooper's 
Point down nearly to Market street ; thence up 
to Sixth street ; thence diagonally about north- 
east to Cooper's creek, portions of their re- 
doubts remaining for many years afterwards. 

The Hessians, under Count Donop, two 
thousand five hundred strong, crossed at 
Cooper's Point late in the afternoon of the 21st 
of October, 1777, on their way to the battle 
of Red Bank, and the straggling survivors, 
after their defeat, returned to Philadelphia the 
same way. Marching to the battle by way of 
Haddonfield and Clement's bridge, in order to 
cross the creeks, the Americans having de- 
stroyed the bridges lower down the stream to 
obstruct such an attack, the Hessians, thirsty, 
stopped to get drink at the brick farm house 
of Joseph Mickle, that stood, until torn down 
in April, 1908, on Mickle hill, east of Mount 
Ephraim avenue, between Everett and Thur- 
man streets, near the stand-pipe. Unable to 
pump water they vented their displeasure in 
unintelligible Dutch, until Joseph Mickle's wife 
came to the pump and by the simple, familiar 



22 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

device of pouring water down it caused its 
buckets to draw water. Their thirst quenched, 
the Hessians, without damage to Joseph 
Mickle's premises, marched on to their crush- 
ing defeat. 

Lying directly opposite Philadelphia, Cam- 
den's territory was constantly overrun, and its 
farming population harassed and alarmed by 
detached parties of British soldiery skirmishing 
and foraging, taking what they wished. When 
the British fleet arrived at Philadelphia, their 
men-of-war anchored on the Pennsylvania side, 
while their convoys and tenders, numbering 
about one hundred, filled the Jersey channel, 
and cannon balls from their guns are preserved 
to-day, as valued relics, by the descendants 
of those along our shores, whom the wanton 
firing greatly alarmed if it did not much dam- 
age. 

Although Camden is not distinguished as 
one of the battlefields of the Revolution, yet 
the ground on which the non-resisting follow- 
ers of Fox have placed their humble meeting- 
house was twice the scene of warlike manoeu- 
vers. In the early part of 1778, Gen. Anthony 
Wayne, being sent with a body of soldiers 
into the lower counties of our State to collect 
horses and cattle for the American army, with 
his usual fierce and bold aggressiveness soon 
made the enemy everywhere dread his on- 
slaught; and Colonel Stirling, with a regiment 
of the Queen's Rangers, one of the best in the 
service, was sent to Haddonfield to watch him. 
Hearing that he had left Mount Holly to at- 



01'' CAMDEN, NKW JERSEY. 23 

tack them, the British, fully believing discre- 
tion to be the better part of valor when "Mad 
Anthony" was about, hastily retreated, never 
stopping until they reached, late at night, the 
shelter of their earthworks at Cooper's Point, 
although "the night was uncommonly severe 
and a cold sleet fell the whole way from Had- 
donfield to the ferry." Wayne pursued them 
with his usual impetuosity. The next morn- 
ing, March ist, 1778, the enemy sent out fifty 
picked men for some remaining forage three 
or four miles up the Haddonfield road, who 
were met by Wayne's advancing cavalry and 
forced to retreat. The Americans dashed on 
to the very lines of the British, drawn up be- 
tween Sixth and Market streets and Cooper's 
Creek bridge. A sharp and spirited skir- 
mish ensued, heavy firing being kept up by the 
British, from about where the Friends' meet- 
ing-house now stands, on the main body of 
the Americans, stationed in the woods along 
the Haddonfield road, which then intersected 
Market street at Broadway, where the Catholic 
church now is. The British, outnumbering 
the Americans ten to one, compelled them to 
retire to the woods, but without the loss of a 
man, although the British had several wounded 
and one sergeant of grenadiers killed. As the 
patriots retired, an officer reined up his steed 
and, "facing the Rangers as they dashed on, 
slowly waved his sword for his attendants to 
retreat. The English Light Infantry came 
within fifty yards of him, when one of them 
called out, 'You are a brave fellow, but vou 



24 HISTORICAI. SKETCH 

must go away.' The undaunted officer, paying 
no attention to the warning, one McGill, after- 
wards a quartermaster, was ordered to fire at 
him. He did so, and wounded the horse, but 
the rider was unscathed, and soon joined his 
comrades in the woods a Httle way off.'" This 
daring officer was the Count Pulaski. 

Soon afterwards, in the same month, Pu- 
laski, whilst reconnoitering with a body of 
horsemen, almost under the fortifications of 
the British, was only saved from an ambush, 
arranged by Colonel Shaw on both sides of 
old Cooper street, near the Friends' meeting- 
house, by William West, a patriot, apprised 
of the danger, who, seeing him riding down 
the road some distance ahead of his men, lead- 
ing them into the trap, waved to him to re- 
treat. Taking the hint, Pulaski at once wheel- 
ed his men and the ambuscade failed. Not so 
fortunate, however, was a party of militia that 
the British surprised about this time, at Coop- 
er's Creek bridge, many, after a sharp fight, be- 
ing killed and the rest taken prisoners. Soon 
afterwards the enemy evacuated Philadelphia, 
the scene of hostilities shifted, and our imme- 
diate neighborhood had little further annoy- 
ance from the Red-coats. 

In June, 1777, the Trustees of Princeton 
College met at Cooper's Ferry, where they 
formally admitted the graduating class of 1776 
to their Bachellor's degree, as of the Com- 
mencement in September of that year, a 
quorum of the Board not having been then 

I Mickle, p. 51. 



01^ CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 25 

present. The announcement of their meeting 
in Camden, said to have been the only one held 
outside of Princeton under the stress of war, 
was made by President Witherspoon in the 
New Jersey Gazette of September i6th, 1778. 
Nassau Hall was occupied by the British as a 
barrack prior to January 3d, 1777, when 
Washington won the battle of Princeton, and 
afterwards was used as a hospital and a bar- 
rack by the Americans, which may account 
for the meeting of the College Trustees at 
Cooper's ferry.' 

Long before the Revolution, Franklin spent 
a night within our present Camden, of which 
he tells in his famous autobiography. In Oc- 
tober, 1723, being a boy of but seventeen, and 
on his way to Philadelphia to seek employment 
as a printer, he came across a boat at Burling- 
ton in the evening going to Philadelphia and 
went aboard of it. There being no wind, all, 
Franklin included, were forced to row the 
whole way. About midnight, fearing that they 
had passed the unlighted town, they put ashore, 
and, building a fire of fence rails, staid until 
morning, when they found they were in the 
mouth of Cooper's Creek, "a little above Phila- 
phia," where they arrived "about eight or nine 
o'clock on the Sunday morning and landed at 
the Market street wharf." Up which street, 
having bought "three great puffy rolls," he 
walked in his working clothes, "with a roll un- 
der each arm and eating the other," passing 
his future wife standing in the doorway of her 

I N. J. Archives, 2d Series, Vol. 2, p. 436. 



26 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

father's house, who thought that he made "a 
most awkward, ridiculous appearance," which, 
he says, "I certainly did." 

Washington, while President, at times cross- 
ed the Delaware to ride out the road from 
Cooper's Ferry. He last did so early in 1797, 
when he nearly frightened out of his wits a 
Dutchman, a Hessian deserter at the battle of 
Trenton, who said to him, "I tink I has seen 
your face before; vat ish your name?" The 
President, reining in his horse and bowing, 
said, "My name is George Washington." The 
Dutchman, thunderstruck, cried out, "Oh, 
mine Gott, I vish I vos unter te ice. I vish I 
was unter te ice. Oh, mine Gott." Washing- 
ton reassured him and smilingly rode on. 

Had Camden the choice of four great Revo- 
lutionary names to be associated with her his- 
tory she could hardly have done better than 
Washington, Franklin, Wayne and Pulaski. 

During the British occupancy of Philadel- 
phia one of their cannon balls pierced the brick 
wall of the chimney of Joseph Kaighin's farm 
house, which stood at the southeast corner of 
Front street and Kaig-hn avenue, and rolled 
out on the hearth of the open fireplace. As 
a relic connecting Camden's history with the 
sterling men and stirring events of the Revo- 
lution it was exhibited at the great Sanitary 
Fair, held in Logan Square in Philadelphia, in 
1864, which realized over $1,000,000, in aid 
of the sick and wounded United States soldiers 
of the War of the Rebellion. 



OF CAMDEN^ NEW JERSEY. 2/ 

Paul Jones' famous warship, Alliance, 
launched just before the making of the treaty 
by which France became our ally in the Revo- 
lutionary War and named in honor of that 
event, was laid up shortly after the close of 
that war, on the east side of Petty's Island, 
near its southern end, where her remains yet 
were when Isaac Mickle published, in 1845, 
his valuable "Reminiscences of Old Glouces- 
ter." Barber and Howe, in their New Jersey 
Historical Collections, tell the following anec- 
dote in the career of the Alliance: "In an en- 
counter with a British vessel, a shot entered 
the corner of the Alliance's counter, and made 
its way into a locker, where all the china be- 
longing to the captain was kept. An African 
servant of Commodore Barry, a great favorite, 
ran up to the quarter deck, and called out, 
'Massa dat — Ingresse man broke all de chana !' 
'You rascal,' said the Commodore, 'why did 
you not stop the ball?' 'Sha, massa, cannon- 
ball must hab a room.' " 

"How they brought the good news from 
Ghent to Aix," the lovers of Robert Brown- 
ing know. How they brought the good news 
from Ghent to America, of the signing at that 
town, on December 24th, 18 14, of the treaty 
of peace, ending the war of 1812', the Ameri- 
cans first knew when the British sloop-of-war. 
Favorite, on February nth, 1815, cast an- 
chor in New York harbor, the glad tidings 
being confirmed two weeks later, when the 
schooner Transit brought the copy of the 
treaty. Afterwards the Transit, her sea-going 



2S HISTORICAL. SKETCH 

days over, was laid up on the northern end 
of the now removed Windmill Island, opposite 
Chestnut street, Philadelphia, with her stern 
toward the river, and on it painted the name 
"Messenger of Peace," remaining there as a 
pleasure house, Mickle says, until within a few 
years of his publication of his "Reminiscences 
of Old Gloucester." 

Evidence of the growth of a pine forest 
over much of Camden's territory, later, by 
over a century, than the name Pyne Poynte, 
is furnished by Hill's "Map of Ten Miles 
Around Philadelphia," published in 1809, 
whereon all the territory between Broadway 
and Cooper's Creek and Federal and Line 
streets is marked "R. M. Cooper's Pine Field, 
300 acres." Near the centre of that field in 
early days was a lake much frequented by 
wild geese and ducks, which, surrounded by 
the pine forest, is shown in an oil painting of 
it by a Philadelphia artist, as a picturesque 
body of water. So late as 1845, there were, 
according to Mickle, those who remembered 
when it contained several feet of water 
throughout the year. The cutting down of the 
trees surrounding the lake and the general 
clearing of the land along Cooper's Creek and 
Delaware River lowered their waters, causing 
that in the lake to be drained. 

Of the oak forest that thickly covered the 
ground between Market and Main and Sixth 
and Eighth streets, quite a number of trees yet 
remain. They ov/e their preservation largely 
to the fact that in them was established and 



01^ CAMDEN^ N:eW JERSEY. 29 

kept for many years Diamond Cottage Garden, 
the last of the numerous public pleasure gar- 
dens that formerly were scattered over Cam- 
den, The Cottage, with its diamond-paned 
windows, stood partly across the south side- 
walk of Penn street below Seventh street and 
was torn down in 1891. Several years before 
that the grounds had been abandoned as a 
public garden, but the trees were allowed to 
stand and their cool shade was freely enjoyed 
by the public and the place was popularly 
known as Diamond Cottage Park. The New 
Jersey State Agricultural Society held its fair 
in that woods in 1855, the only year its fair 
has been held in Camden. 

The large elm tree standing in Cooper 
Park, just north of the Public Library, has a 
history. Richard M. Cooper, who lived in 
that house, had in his household a child's nurse 
whose family lived in Kensington, Philadel- 
phia, near the Treaty Elm. Once on her re- 
turn from a visit to them she brought with her 
a young sucker from that tree and planted it 
in his yard. It grew and flourished, and is the 
fine specimen adorning the Park to-day. A 
sucker from it is growing on the sidewalk on 
the north side of Penn street, just below 
Seventh street. So, Camden has living to-day 
both a child and a grandchild of the Penn 
Treaty elm. 

For many years after the Revolution, Cam- 
den was a town only in name, and that only 
on paper, being called Cooper's Ferries, or 
simply The Ferries, until after the beginning 



30 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

of this century. A few sales of lots had been 
made and a few houses began to cluster about 
the ferries, and a road or two more had been 
opened, but all else was farm or woodland. 

When the Nineteenth century opened not a 
house of worship stood within the present 
limits of Camden. In 1801, however, the 
Friends, having decided to move their place 
of meeting from their old house on Newton 
Creek to a more central locality, built the brick 
meeting-house that stands at the corner of 
Mount Ephraim avenue and Mount Vernon 
street, the forerunner of Camden's present 
ninety churches; and next, in 1810, the Tvletho- 
dists dedicated their first church at the north- 
west corner of Fourth and Federal streets, 
long since converted into stores, followed, in 
18 1 8, by the First Baptist Church, on Fourth 
street, and thereafter the churches kept pace 
with Camden's growth. 

The mode of ferriage across the Delaware 
in open boats, established as we have seen so 
early in our history, remained without change 
or improvement until 1809 or 1810. when a 
small steamboat, carrying passengers only, 
was placed on the river. She was named 
Camden and ran from the foot of Cooper street 
to the lower side of Market street, Philadel- 
phia. In 1809 the ferry at Kaighn's Point 
was established by Joseph Kaighn (who drop- 
ped the last i in the name Kaighin because it 
had ceased to be pronounced) and soon a 
small steamboat, also carrying passengers only, 
and also, it is believed, called Camden, was 




•jK^sSs^ikr 



OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 3 1 

placed on the line. Which of the two was the 
first steamboat is doubtful. After them came 
one called ''The Twins," because she had two 
hulls clamped together with the wheel pro- 
pelling her in the centre between them, a type 
used many years afterwards in the small 
steamboat, John Smith, which plied for a time 
between Arch street^ Philadelphia, and the 
northern end of Windmill Island. After The 
Twins came the steamboat Rebecca, built in 
1813, popularly known as "Aunt Becky," 
which ran from Cooper's Point to Arch street, 
and whose peculiarities were that she had a 
single propelling wheel astern, causing her to 
be further nicknamed "The Wheelbarrow," 
and had a wooden boiler, hooped like a cask, 
but, nevertheless, an effective one, since she 
frequently made her run in five minutes. 
Crude as were those early steamboats they 
were marvelous advances over the primitive 
wherries, open row boats built with double 
keels to enable them, when the river was part- 
ly frozen, to be drawn from the water and 
upon and along the ice until open water was 
again reached. But the passenger traffic 
across the river was too inconsiderable to keep 
up such a stride, and, after a few years, the 
ferrymen, taking in sail, adopted in summer 
tlie team boats, propelled by ' horses walking 
round a circle on a tread wheel, and stopping 
entirely for an hour at noon-time to feed the 
horses; and in the winter, when the ice in the 
river was not frozen solid, they fell back upon 
the old wherries. It was not until 1835 that 



32 HISTORICAI. SKETCH 

the steam ferryboat, regularly making its trips 
winter and summer alike, became firmly estab- 
lished as a fixture on the Delaware highway. 
When it was proposed to build a steamboat 
powerful enough to break through ice, "many 
declared it as impossible as it would be to 
propel a boat up Market street hill." But the 
old State Rights, with her eighty horse-power, 
and the ever larger, more powerful boats fol- 
lowing her, culminating in those of to-day, 
carrying yearly some twelve millions of passen- 
gers to and fro across the Delaware without 
stoppage by the ice, prove the force of Kos- 
suth's motto, "Nothing is impossible to him 
that wills." 

In 1812 the village of Camden had become 
sufficiently important and known throughout 
the State to be named by the Legislature, in the 
act of January 12th of that year, establishing 
State banks, as one of the six towns authorized 
to do so. Under that act Camden's first bank 
was incorporated on June i6th, 181 2, as "The 
President, Directors and Company of the State 
Bank at Camden." An unwieldy name which 
was quickly shortened in common parlance to 
The State Bank at Camden, and so retained 
until its conversion to a National bank on 
June 2d, 1865. After which its present name. 
The National State Bank of Camden, gradually 
attached itself. Not until sixty-one years after 
its start had Camden a trust company. The 
Camden Safe Deposit and Trust Company was 
incorporated on April 4th, 1873, and began 
business in July following. Camden's size. 



OP CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 



33 



and its importance as the financial centre of 
South Jersey has grown until now, 1909, three 
National banks and five trust companies find 
in it a good field for wise financial manage- 
ment, profitable to them and beneficial to its 
citizens, and to those of a widely surrounding 
circle. 




34 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

Ci^apter 2 

Though Camden's early growth was very 
slow, and half a century after its birth it was 
but a small town, yet it had a vigor of self- 
assertion that compelled its recognition by the 
people of the county. The annual town meet- 
ings of Newton township had been held alter- 
nately here and at Haddonfield until 1827, 
when the Haddonfield people, conscious of 
their greater voting strength, at the town meet- 
ing, held regularly in turn at their place, re- 
solved to shove Camden to the wall and there- 
after to meet only at Haddonfield. Their 
superior number carried the question. But he 
laughs best who laughs last, and they uncon- 
sciously aroused the young giant that ever 
afterward whipped them in many a hard 
fought battle. The Camdenians left the town 
meeting very indignant, and Jeremiah Sloan, 
then a talented young lawyer of great promise, 
said to the Haddonfielders, "I'll fix you ; I will 
have Camden incorporated next winter." He 
executed his threat, and at the next session of 
the Legislature the act w^as passed incorporat- 
ing the city of Camden. 

Thus it was that Camden, with a population 
of but 1,143, attained her legal majority with 
the right to manage her own affairs as she 
saw fit, free from the tutelage of country town 
meetings. 

This first charter was passed February 13th, 
1828, and is entitled "An act to incorporate a 



OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 35 

part of the township of NewtoH, in the county 
of Gloucester." It has only eighteen sections, 
and, though but eighty-one years have passed, 
many of its provisions already sound quaint. 
It calls Broadway "the public road leading to 
Woodbury from the Camden Academy," and 
Newton avenue "the road leading from 
Kaighinton to Cooper's Creek bridge," and 
Petty's Island "Pethey's Island." It provides, 
in section i, that the new city shall be called 
"The City of Camden," and then, in section 2, 
that the corporate name of the city shall be 
"The Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council 
of the City of Camden." The city officials were 
a Mayor, a Recorder, four Aldermen , five 
Common Councilmen and a Town Clerk. The 
Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen and Common 
Council, or a majority of them, of whom the 
Mayor or Recorder must be one, were author- 
ized to hold a Common Council and to make 
ordinances and regulations for the well order- 
ing and governing of the city. The Common 
Council were to be chosen at the annual town 
meetings on the second Monday in March and 
within six days thereafter they were to elect 
the Mayor. 

The Recorder and Aldermen, as semi-judi- 
cial officers, were to be appointed by the Legis- 
lature "in joint meeting" in the same manner 
as justices of the peace were appointed and to 
continue in office for the same time (i. e. five 
years). The charter further provided that 
"one of the Aldermen and one of the Com- 
mon Council shall always be a resident of 



36 HISTORICAIv SKETCH 

Kaighintoii, and one of each of said officers 
shall always be a resident of the village com- 
monly called 'William Cooper's Ferry.' " And 
that the Mayor, Recorder and Aldermen shall 
constitute a court to be styled "the Court of 
General Quarter Sessions of the Peace of the 
City of Camden," having within the city all 
the powers that the county courts of Quarter 
Sessions had or might have, excepting the 
granting of tavern licenses, and hearing ap- 
peals in pauper cases — a court abolished by the 
act of February 29th, 1856. 

The new city was bounded by the Delaware 
River from the mouth of Cooper's Creek to 
the mouth of Little Newton Creek (by every 
one called Line Ditch), by it to the east side 
of Broadway, by it to the east side of New- 
ton avenue, by it to the south side of Federal 
street, by it to the middle of Cooper's Creek 
and by it to the Delaware River. 

At the first election for city officers, held 
March loth, 1828, in town meeting at the 
Academy, which stood at Sixth and Market 
streets, where the George Genge public school 
now is, the following Common Councilmen 
were chosen : James Duer, from Cooper's 
Ferry; John Lawrence, Ebenezer Toole and 
Richard Fetters, from Camden, and Joseph 
Kaighn, from Kaighnton. James Duer and 
Joseph Kaighn declining to serve, at a special 
election held on the fifth of the following April, 
Edward Dougherty and Richard B. Champion 
were chosen in their place. The new Council 
held its first meeting on March 13th, 1828, and 




FIRST COURT HOUSE AND CITY HALL 



OP CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 37 

elected Samuel Lanning first Mayor of Cam- 
den. 

The new municipality, however, had but lit- 
tle of the appearance of a city. The three vil- 
lages of which it was composed — Camden 
proper, Cooper's Point and Kaighn's Point — 
remained separated by cultivated farms and by 
woods and retained their peculiar characteris- 
tics for many years. Extending but a short 
distance from the river, all the territory east 
of them to Cooper's Creek was as much coun- 
try as any other part of the county, and where 
used for purposes of husbandry only, was, by 
the charter, exempted from taxation for the 
support of the city. 

I cannot better contrast then and now than 
by bringing to light from the musty first min- 
utes of Council two transactions. On April 
23d, 1828, "The Council rented of Richard 
Fetters for one year the room over his store 
for the purpose of a temporary Council and 
Court hall, for the sum of twenty-five dollars 
per annum or six dollars per quarter." And 
on June 5th, 1829, the committee appointed to 
make "a fair expose of the receipts and ex- 
penditures of the corporation up to this date," 
reported to Council that there had come into 
Samuel Lanning's hands $3,456.23, and paid 
out by him $3,512.49, leaving a balance due 
him of $56.26. 

The Common Council quickly acted to pro- 
vide a permanent town hall by passing, on 
June I2th, 1828, an ordinance appointing Sam- 
uel Lanning, John K. Cowperthwaite and Rich- 



38 HISTORICAIv SKETCH 

ard Fetters commissioners to buy a lot and 
build a jail and court house ''in the said city, 
agreeably to their best skill and understanding, 
and which may be the most judicious plan 
for our city," and authorizing them "to borrow 
from Jacob Evaul" (a farmer living a short 
distance outside of Camden) "$2,500 at six 
per cent, interest" for that purpose. They pur- 
chased a lot on the south side of Federal street, 
below Fifth street, and built thereon a small, 
baldly plain, unpretentious stone and brick 
building, having on the ground floor "a jail 
or lock up" and on the second floor a court 
room, used also as a council chamber, reached 
by a wooden stairway on the outside of its 
Federal street front. As the only public hall 
in the city for over a quarter of a century, 
its court room was used for nearly every meet- 
ing of a public nature then held in Camden. 
On the building of our present City Hall, on 
Haddon avenue, the old hall was torn down in 
1878, and in its place was built a large brick 
market house, which, in turn, was torn down 
in 1900 that the present fine office building of 
the Public Service Corporation might be built 
on its site. 

The town having reached the dignity of a 
municipality, the name of its post-office, which 
from 1803 had been Cooper's Ferry, was 
changed on June 22d, 1829, to Camden. 

About this time the desire for a more speedy 
conveyance than the old stage coach was crop- 
ping out in many places throughout the coun- 
try, and very general inquiry was being made 



OF CAMDKN^ NEW JERSEY. 39 

into the feasibility of railroads to meet the 
want. During 1827 the project of a railway 
to connect Philadelphia and New York began 
to be talked of in earnest. Meetings were 
held in the Camden Academy of those favor- 
ing the enterprise, preliminary surveys made, 
and such general interest excited as finally re- 
sulted in the Legislature granting, on Febru- 
ary 4th, 1830, the charter for "The Camden 
and Amboy Railroad and Transportation Com- 
pany." The company was soon organized and 
the road begun, and in January, 1834, the first 
train ran into Camden. This was a very 
marked event for the young city. The railroad 
was the longest then built in this country and 
its completion a matter of great rejoicing. 
People kept watch to see the trains arrive, even 
those as far off as Kaighn's Point, no houses 
then intervening, going to the tops of their 
houses to view the novel sight. 

Hardly four years had passed after the in- 
corporation of Camden, when some of her 
prominent citizens, on March 16, 1832, pro- 
cured a charter for the incorporation of "The 
Camden Fire Insurance Company," a stock 
company, the preamble of which stated that 
sundry inhabitants of Camden City and its 
vicinity had represented to the Legislature that 
insurance on property in this State is frequent- 
ly and to a large amount made in Philadelphia, 
and that an insurance company in Camden 
"would tend to the great convenience of the in- 
habitants and would confine at home a source 
of wealth which is yearly carried into another 



40 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

State." The company continued in business 
for some years, but not proving so successful 
in confining at home the wealth its promoters 
hoped, an act of the Legislature was pass- 
ed in 1849 creating Abraham Browning, 
Thomas H. Dudley and Isaiah Toy trustees to 
wind up its affairs. In 1841, The Camden 
Mutual Insurance Association was incorpo- 
rated, and as the stock company into which it 
was converted in 1870 under an act of the 
Legislature, and under the name of The Cam- 
den Fire Insurance Association, which it adopt- 
ed by certificate filed on February 3d, 1881, 
continues to-day, after The National State 
Bank, the oldest business corporation existent 
in Camden. 

Jacob Cooper, in laying out Camden, planned 
the open square at the intersection of Third and 
Market streets for a market place similar to 
those in many towns in England. It was 
never so used and Camden never so fully 
adopted the system of open market sheds in 
the streets as did Philadelphia. In 1837 City 
Council caused a small one to be built on Third 
street immediately south of Market street, and 
in 1S56 a second one to be erected in the center 
of Third street from Arch to Federal street. 
The last was removed in 1876 and the first 
shortly before it, to the great improvement of 
the street. 

Not satisfied with being a city, Camden ere 
long began to think that there should be a new 
county created, with it as the shire-town, and 
actively pushed the project. This excited 



OP CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 4 1 

great opposition throughout the coun+y. In- 
dignation meetings were held at Woodbury 
and other places. The Camden people had to 
fight almost unaided their uphill battle. They 
claimed it as a necessary measure "to accom- 
modate the fast swelling population of the 
north and northwestern townships, and partly 
to secure to West Jersey her just share of in- 
fluence in the State Government." At last, 
after a hard fight under the lead of Captain 
John W. Mickle, an uncompromising Demo- 
crat, they won and got the Legislature, which 
was Democratic, to pass, on March 13, 1844, 
under the plea that the new county would be 
Democratic, the act setting it off from Old 
Gloucester, and had it named after their own 
city, which was to be the seat of justice for one 
year and until an election could be had. But 
the people throughout the county were so in- 
censed at the city's again foiling them that at 
the first election they voted, irrespective of 
party, against the Democratic nominees, recog- 
nizing no other issue than Camden and Anti- 
Camden, and for fifteen years the Democrats 
never carried the county. For many years 
afterwards, whenever Captain Mickle went to 
Trenton, he was taunted about his Democratic 
county ; and to this day Camden county is poli- 
tically anti-Democratic. 

The same antagonism again cropped out at 
the permanent fixing of the county seat. The 
act creating Camden county required that its 
courts should be held at the Court House in 
Camden for one year, when, at an election to 



42 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

be fixed by the Freeholders, the location of 
the county seat was to be determined by a 
majority vote. Camden, of course, nominated 
herself and supported her nomination with 
great unanimity. The rest of the county was 
divided in its choice. At the election held on 
August 1 2th, 1845, to determine the question, 
Camden received 1,062, Gloucester 822, Had- 
donfield 422, and Mount Ephraim 33 votes. 
No place receiving a majority, a statute was 
approved April ist, 1846, providing for two 
elections. At the first a majority of votes 
was necessary to a choice. If no place re- 
ceived a majority then a second election was 
to be had at which a plurality would decide 
the question. No place having received a 
majority at the first election held under that 
Act, a second one was had, when the county 
united on Long-a-Coming (Berlin) and gave 
it 1,498 votes while Camden received but 
1,434 votes. But the Camdenians would not 
stay down, and in 1848, aided largely by the 
able pugnacity of the late Abraham Brown- 
ing, of honored memory, after continued de- 
feats in the courts had a statute passed, direct- 
ing a new election. The fourth fight was 
fourfold bitter. Again it was the whole of the 
country against the city. But Camden had 
well encased herself in armor against the 
shafts of her opponents in her unaided tilt 
against the field, and came out victorious with 
a vote of 2,444 against 795 for Haddonfield 
and 705 for Long-a-Coming. This last elec- 
tion definitely settled the contest, the country 



OP camde;n, new jerse^y. 43 

people submitted to the inevitable, and to- 
day admit that, however unfairly it may have 
been made, the choice was a wise one. 

Immediately after the settlement of this 
question a strong rivalry sprang up over the 
location of the court house between John W. 
Mickle, president of the Federal Street Ferry 
Company, and Abraham Browning, heavily 
interested with his brothers in the Market 
Street Ferry, founded by their father, Abra- 
ham Browning, each striving to have it placed 
on the street leading to the ferry in which he 
was interested, in the hope of turning to that 
ferry the trend of travel. The struggle was 
finally settled by putting the Court House 
equi-distant from each ferry. And that is 
the reason it was built where it was, on the 
lot nearest to the ferries that extended from 
Federal to Market street, and placed exactly 
midway between the two streets. 

The beneficent effect of building and loan 
associations, the first of which is said to have 
been created in 181 5 by the canny Scotch 
and the system to have been introduced into 
our country about the year 1840, was early 
grasped by the thrifty, intelligent business and 
working men of Camden. The New Jersey 
statute authorizing the incorporation of them 
was approved February 28th, 1849, ^"^1 two 
months had hardly passed, when on May 5th, 
1849, ^he Camden Building Association was 
incorporated under it, followed on March 2d, 
1 85 1, by The South Ward Building and Loan 
Association. And thereafter the associations 



44 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

grew continually until to-day some thirty odd 
of them in our city flourishingly demonstrate 
their value in aiding their members to acquire 
homes, to invest with profit their savings, and 
to educate themselves in determining the 
values of real estate, and in safely investing 
money therein. 

Of the two public utilities, water and gas, 
water was first furnished to Camden by a 
private corporation. The Camden Water 
Works Company supplied from its pipes on 
November ist, 1846, the first public water to 
the city, continuing to do so until the city 
purchased its plant and took possession 
thereof on July i, 1870. Somewhat more 
than six years followed the introduction of 
public water before gas for lighting was fur- 
nished, which has always been supplied by a 
private corporation. The Camden Gas Light 
Company lighted the city in that way for the 
first time on Christmas night, 1852, a year 
noted also for the completion on Market 
street and on Federal street of the first paving 
of the roadway of any of the city streets, 
cobble stones being used for the purpose. 

In 1850 Camden obtained a new charter 
with enlarged powers but no increase of ter- 
ritory, divided, however, into three wards, 
North, Middle and South, and began to grow 
with considerable energy, until the horrible 
burning of the ferryboat New Jersey, on the 
night of March 15th, 1856, with its holocaust 
of sixty-one lives, at once checked migrations 
from Philadelphia, while the panic of 1857 fol- 



OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 45 

lowing, completed the blow to its prosperity. 
Then the doubt and uncertainty of the im- 
pending rebellion, and the exhaustion of the 
struggle when entered upon, protracted the 
stagnation, and our city lay in a torpor until 
late after the collapse of the war the prosper- 
ous times thawed it into new life, that, burst- 
mg the chrysalis of the boundaries of its origi- 
nal incorporation of 1828, reached out and 
grasped, under its revised charter of 1871, 
new territory, increasing its size three fold. 
So that it covered all the territory between the 
Delaware River and Cooper's Creek on the 
river front, as far south as the mouth of New- 
ton Creek, up which the boundary ran east- 
ward to its north branch, and up it to the 
Mount Ephraim road, thence up to Ferry 
avenue, along which and the continuation 
thereof in a right line it extended to Cooper's 
Creek; very nearly the boundaries of the 
island Aquikanasra as noted and mapped by 
both the Dutch and the Swedes in their early 
surveys of the Delaware. 

To tell the whole story of the tried loyalty 
of Camden's citizens in the struggle of 1861- 
65 for the maintenance of the Union would 
take many pages, but that history must not 
pass unnoted. The thrill of indignant patriot- 
ism that instantaneously ran through the 
North, when rebellion fired its first shot on 
Fort Sumter, fusing all citizens alike into the 
Union Party for the sustaining of the Govern- 
ment, caused 116 of Camden's citizens, headed 
by Dr. Isaac S. Mulford, a Friend, to send 



46 HISTORICAI, SKETCH 

to President Lincoln on April i6th, 1861, fouri 
days after that first shot was fired, a stirringi 
address in which they "declare our unalterable; 
determination to sustain the government in; 
Its efforts to maintain the honor, the integrity 
and the existence of our National Union and' 
the perpetuity of the popular government, and' 
to redress the wrongs long enough endured,; 
no differences of political opinion, no badge; 
of diversity upon points of party distinction,! 
shall restrain or withhold us in the devotion; 
of all we have or can command to the vindica-| 
tion of the Constitution, the maintenance ofj 
the laws and the defence of the Flag of ouri 
Country." ! 

Two days afterwards, on April i8th, a great! 
Union meeting was held at the Court House,! 
presided over by John W. Mickle, whose Dem-, 
ocracy was only exceeded by his patriotism,; 
and who closed his short opening speech by; 
saying "That flag has got to go up." Just one; 
week later, on April 25th, four companies of! 
volunteers went to Trenton to report to Gov-i 
ernor Olden. They were the Washington; 
Grays, Captain E. Price Hunt; the Camden| 
Light Artillery, Captain Isaac W. Mickle; the, 
Stockton Cadets, Captain Edmund G. Jackson,: 
and the Camden Zouaves, Captain John R. 
Cunningham. 

Camden, having by the census of i860 a. 
pouplation of 14,368, followed that first enthu-' 
siastic rally by sending, during the war, over! 
2,500 men to the Union army and navy, a con-! 
tribution of very nearly one-fifth of its entire; 
population to the struggle for a united country, i 



oif camde;n, new jersey. 47 

The superiority of a well organized paid 
service for the extinguishment of fires over an 
unorganized volunteer one, composed of many 
independent separate fire companies with their 
turbulent jealousies and rivalries, so impressed 
itself on City Council that, by ordinance pass- 
ed on September 2d, 1869, it organized Cam- 
den's well managed fire department. 

In the year 1871, when the Camden Horse 
Railroad Company started its passenger cars, 
came what all had been hoping for, public con- 
veyances enabling everyone to ride from one 
end of the city to the other, so evidently sup- 
plying a public want that the West Jersey 
Press was enabled thus exultantly to describe 
the opening of the lines to public travel : "Fed- 
eral street had a huge load of excitement to 
stagger under on Saturday last, and the street 
was crowded with spectators from early morn 
to dewy eve, while the curbstone corners in 
particular were the resorts of shouting boys 
and wondering men. A long wished for event 
came to pass, and a new era in the growth of 
the city's conveniences was successfully in- 
augurated. In a word the new horse cars be- 
gan to run. Let us mark the date, November 
25th, 1 87 1. Such occurrences as these are 
mile posts in the history of our city's progress, 
and should be recorded as worthy of special 
eclat." 

The effort for the establishment of a library 
in Camden began almost with the incorpora- 
tion of the city. The Worthington Library 



48 HISTORICAIv SKETCH 

Company organized as early as February, 
1838; the Camden Literary and Library As- 
sociation organized January 23d, 1852; the 
Camden Library Company, incorporated 
March 19th, 1878, and the various church 
hbraries, attest to efforts made to fill the need 
felt by many Camdenians for the instruction, 
the stimulus and the pleasure of books. But, . 
none of these library associations were per- 
manent, and their books disappeared when they 
did. It was not until the voluntary free pub- 
lic library, opened on November 28th, 1898, 
in the old family mansion in Cooper Park, 
and, with aid from the city, carried on there 
for four years, so educated the people to the 
value to be gained from free libraries, that 
they adopted, at the election held in November, 
1902', the provisions of New Jersey's free 
library law, taxing themselves one-third of a 
mill on every dollar of their assessable prop- 
erty for the support of a library. Thus the 
free library became a permanent feature of 
Camden, allowing her to take her position in 
line with the other advanced cities and towns 
of New Jersey that had adopted that statute. 
Then, with Andrew Carnegie's gift of $120,- 
000 for proper library buildings, was built the 
Main Library at Broadway and Line street, 
opened on June 27th, 1905, and the East 
Branch, opened on June i8th, 1906, and also 
was remodelled and enlarged the Cooper 
Branch, reopened on September loth, 1907; 
each building an ornament to its locality. 



0^ CAMDEN^ Ni:W JE:RSE;Y. 49 

From a desire for political or territorial 
aggrandizement, towns at times seek con- 
tiguous smaller ones that, having acquired a 
distinctive life of their ovv^n, which they prize, 
surrender it only under compulsion. But, that 
charge cannot be brought against Camden in 
its next increase of territory. At the request 
of the inhabitants of the town of Stockton, 
conscious that their prosperity and happiness 
would be enhanced thereby, was passed the 
act of March 24th, 1899, annexing that town 
to the city of Camden, enlarging its boundary 
one-third and its population one-sixth. And 
so fitting and complete was the amalgamation 
that that addition is to-day as blended a part 
of the life of the city as is any other section 
of its territory. So much so that on the locat- 
ing of the free library buildings one was placed 
in that new territory without dissent. 

Grown metropolitan in size and importance, 
the time had come in the judgment of City 
Council for Camden to be no longer without 
a coat of arms, and it invited the Camden 
County Historical Society to suggest one. 
The Society did so with the motto "Virtus et 
Industria." Council adopted both suggestions 
on February 28th, 1907. The design is a 
shield, the dexter half containing the arms of 
Lord Camden, the sinister half an antique ship 
in the stocks ready for launching, indicative of 
Camden's shipbuilding industries; supporters 
personifying industry and knowledge; the old 
locomotive that first ran into Camden, emble- 
matic of the city of to-day, the great railroad 
4 



50 HISTORICAI. SKETCH 

centre of West Jersey; Lord Camden's crest, 
and the pine tree springing from it, typifying 
the primeval forest that covered so much of 
Camden's territory and recalHng the origin of 
its first name, Pyne Poynte. 




OF CAMDKN, Ne;w jersey. 5 1 



Ci^aptet 3 

Of incidents historic and biographic in Cam- 
den's hfe the setting down of a few may make 
more vivid its retrospect. 

The estabhshment of the first bank of issue 
in New Jersey, if not in America, almost at 
Camden's door, is closely enough connected 
with her first settlers to be named as the 
earliest of such incidents. Mark Newbie, who 
lived, Mickle says, on the farm afterwards 
owned by Joseph B. Cooper, where is now the 
Borough of Wood-Lynne, and Judge Clement 
says, on the Champion road just west of the 
West Collingswood railroad station, brought 
with him from London a large number of cop- 
per coins, made in Ireland by the Roman 
Catholics after the massacre there in 1641 and 
known as Patrick's half-pence. The New Jer- 
sey Assembly in May, 1682, by statute au- 
thorized their circulation by Newbie as cur- 
rency and made them a legal tender to the 
amount of five shillings, provided he, Mark, 
should give security for their redemption on 
demand, which he did by mortgaging for 
that purpose 300 acres of his land. And so 
the much needed currency was for several 
years supplied to Camden's pioneers and to 
their neighbors. Those coins are now very 
rare and not to be found except in a few numis- 
matic collections. 

The honor of being the first place in the 
United States to form a Republican Club is 



52 HISTORICAI, SKETCH 

claimed for Camden with force. At the Re- 
pubhcan National Convention, held in Phila- 
delphia in 1856, that priority was awarded to 
Michigan, it being shown that such a club was 
formed in that State in May, 1854. Framing- 
ton, Massachussetts, also claims to have 
formed one in the same month. But, the Jef- 
ferson Republican Club of Camden was or- 
ganized April 6th, 1854, at the old Camden 
City Court House, by the election of Joseph M. 
Cooper, as president; Edward N. Dougherty, 
as secretary, and Dr. Sylvester Birdsall as 
treasurer. It really had its start in the old 
South Ward (now the Fifth and Sixth 
Wards), in the summer of 1852, when a num- 
ber of Whigs declared themselves for Hale 
and Julian, the candidates for President and 
Vice President of the Free Soil Party. At the 
election in November following. South Ward 
cast 18 votes for that ticket, while Middle and 
North Wards each cast but one vote for it. 
So belongs to Camden the first Republican 
club of our country and to old South Ward 
the impetus from which it sprang. 

Not alone in that priority in matters of State 
and of National public interest has Camden 
rested content. If with none others of such 
broad import, with those of local consequence, 
in leading her own life, she has led her great 
sister Philadelphia. She established her first 
building and loan association more than a year 
before Philadelphia grasped the value of the 
system. Philadelphia, with market sheds yet 
in her streets, clings to what Camden deemed. 



01^ camde;n, new jersey. 53 

more than thirty years ago, unsightly and un- 
clean. For a year after Camden adopted and 
inaugurated her paid fire department Philadel- 
phia remained content with the antiquated 
volunteer fire companies. The trolley system 
for street cars developed on Market street, 
Camden, its superiority over horse cars for 
that public service some time before Philadel- 
phia awakened to the importance of Camden's 
demonstration. In the fall of the year 1897 
the supplying of pure water to Camden from 
its plant of artesian wells at Delair was in- 
augurated, giving a quality of water unsur- 
passed, if equalled, by any city, cool enough 
when direct from the hydrant to be pleasantly 
potable in the hottest weather and so pure as 
to have driven typhoid fever practically from 
the city. Its fame has spread to the Orient, 
and so impressed the United States Minister 
at Bangkok ("City of wild fruit trees"), 
Capital of Siam, a city he estimates of 1,000,- 
000 inhabitants, that on January 4th, 1909, he 
wrote to the Camden Water Department for 
copies of its report for the year 1908. No 
part of Philadelphia had filtered water in the 
year 1897, nor for several years afterward, 
and sections of it struggled with the factory 
refuse, coal dust and sewage-laden Schuylkill 
and Delaware River waters until the spring 
of 1909, when filtered water was finally sup- 
plied to all its parts. 

In citizens of broad charity and public spirit 
Camden has not lacked from its start. Within 
three years of his planning the town, Jacob 



54 HISTORICAI. SKETCH 

Cooper, on April 22d, 1776, for the nominal 
consideration of five shillings, conveyed to 
Charles Lyons and others, trustees "for build- 
ing a place of public worship and a burying 
ground," lot 127 at the northwest corner of 
Fifth and Arch streets, now occupied by fire 
houses, and lots 158 and 159 at the northwest 
corner of Sixth and Arch streets. And, on 
June 23, 1804, his grandchildren supplemented 
his gift of the latter lots by deeding the ad- 
joining lots 156 and 157, at the southwest 
corner of Sixth and Market streets to Edward 
Smith and William Flintham, of Philadelphia, 
and George Genge and Thomas Ackley, of 
Camden, in trust ''to build thereon and main- 
tain a school house, and a dwelling house for 
a teacher." The lot at Fifth and Arch streets 
was used as a "burying ground" for many 
years, but there had been no burials there for 
a long time prior to the building of the first 
fire house thereon. No "place of public wor- 
ship" was built on the lots at the corner of 
Sixth and Arch streets. The Academy, how- 
ever, was built by subscription on the lots at 
the corner of Sixth and Market streets, and 
stood there for nearly sixty years, accommo- 
dating schools and public gatherings. The 
"dwelling house for a teacher" v;as never 
built. George Genge, one of the trustees for 
the Academy lot, by his will, dated September 
28th, 1828, bequeathed to the trustees of Cam- 
den Academy an annuity of eighty dollars "to 
the only and exclusive use of paying the edu- 
cation of poor children in the Academy, or 



01" CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 55 

other school house erected on either of the two 
lots, 156 and 157." By an act of the Legis- 
lature, approved March 2d, 1854, that annuity- 
was authoried to be extinguished by the pay- 
ment to those trustees of the sum of $1,333-34, 
the principal producing it at six per centum 
interest per annum. By a subsequent act, ap- 
proved March 15th, 1854, the trustees were 
authorized to convey the Academy lot and 
premises to the Board of Education of the 
City of Camden, to be by it held "so long as 
the same are used by the said board exclusively 
for the purpose of education," and were di- 
rected to pay to it prior to the delivery of 
such deed all the moneys held by them as 
such trustees to be by it used for public school 
purposes. The public school being free to all 
children the charitable object of George Genge 
was thus faithfully perpetuated. Because of 
that bequest the present school house on that 
lot, built in 1863, was fittingly named George 
Genge School. 

Joseph Kaighn, one of Camden's principal 
citizens, who started in 1809 the first ferry to 
Philadelphia from Kaighn's Point, who was 
president of the original Federal street ferry 
from its start in 1836 until his death in 1841 ; 
who, for several years, was in the Legislature 
as a representative and as a Senator ; and who 
took an active part in all things concerning 
Camden's best movements, gave the valuable 
lot of ground on which the Kaighn school 
now stands. He greatly aided, without pay, 
his cousin, Sarah Kaighn, in her business 



56 HISTORICAI. SKETCH 

affairs, who to compensate him offered to 
convey to him that lot. He asked her to con- 
vey it instead to the public for school pur- 
poses. She did so, by deed to him and others 
m trust, dated March 8th, 1821. The deed 
was hers but the gift was his. 

Richard M. Cooper, president of The State 
Bank at Camden from 181 3 until 1842, when 
he declined a re-election, died March loth, 
1844, leaving a large landed estate in the 
upper part of Camden, which his bachelor 
twin sons. Dr. Richard M. Cooper and 
Lawyer William D. Cooper so successfully 
managed that, when they died, respectively, 
in the year 1874 and in the year 1875, the 
estate had grown to be a very valuable one. 
Dr. Cooper was one of Camden's leading 
physicians, whose professional knowledge and 
experience taught him the importance of a 
good hospital and its aid to the community. 
His brother, William, agreed with him in the 
value of a hospital, and together they hoped 
that the estate they inherited, and which had 
so increased under their charge, might be 
devoted to the establishment and maintenance 
of one in Camden. They died before their 
accomplishment of that hope. But their 
maiden sisters, Sarah W. Cooper and Eliza- 
beth B. Cooper, their devisees, knowing their 
wish, carried it into effect by procuring from 
the Legislature the charter for "The Camden 
Hospital," approved ]\Iarch 24th, 1875, and 
the giving to it of $200,000 in money and the 
conveying to it, by them and their brother 








SECOND CITY HALL 



OF CAMDKN, NEW JERSEY. 57 

Alexander Cooper, of the very valuable lot of 
land now occupied by the hospital. 

In 1877 the main building of the hospital 
was completed ; in 1903 the nurses' home was 
built and in 1907 the north wing to the main 
building was added. The Cooper sisters con- 
sented to the urgent request of the hospital 
trustees, that they might apply to the Legis- 
laure for an act changing the corporate name 
to "The Cooper Hospital," the name by which 
it had become popularly known, and on 
March 6th, 1877, the act making such change 
was approved. That its endowment might be 
increased by the addition of the income 
thereof to the principal, its opening was de- 
layed until August nth, 1887. Since then its 
beneficent work, aided by the liberal gifts of 
$100,000 by John W. Wright, nephew of the 
founders; of $50,000 by William B. Cooper, 
of $10,000 by Judge John Clement and of 
$21,000 by Jane B. Chambers, in the name 
of her father, Joseph Bedlam, and the gifts of 
generous endowers of beds has gone on to the 
great good of all South Jersey. 

Jesse W. Starr, one of Camden's leading 
manufacturers, who with his brother, ex-Con- 
gressman John F. Starr, established and most 
successfully carried on for many years the 
Camden Iron Works, whose residence was 
near the centre of beautifully laid-out grounds 
bounded by Newton avenue, Haddon avenue 
and Line street, gave to Camden, by deed 
dated July loth, 1871, the land on which the 
City Hall stands, upon condition that such a 



58 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

hall should be begun thereon within three 
years and be completed within five years, and 
that that ground should always be used for a 
City Hall and public park, and if it should 
cease to be so used it should revert to him and 
his heirs. There were then no houses in that 
neighborhood east of the west side of Broad- 
way, nor between Newton avenue and the 
Camden and Amboy Railroad, and the site 
seemed so in the open country that Council 
delayed the acceptance of the gift until 1874, 
just before the expiration of the time limited 
for the commencement of the building of a 
hall, when against the strongly-expressed 
wishes of many citizens it built the present 
one. On July 2d, 1874, Mr. Starr gave to the 
city, by deed, the land on which the Soldiers' 
Monument stands, and upon the same condi- 
tion. Wishing to own the land free of the 
condition, Camden, on December 20th, 1883, 
paid to Mr. Starr $10,831.89 for an absolute 
conveyance of all the land bounded by Had- 
don avenue, Washington street and Seventh 
street. 

Other instances of public spirit on the part 
of her people might well be cited to show that 
Camden has never lacked citizens who felt 
their duty to their fellow-men and whose 
loyalty thereto made them glad to contribute 
what they could to aid her public weal. 

From the effort of the North Ward Bounty 
Association, formed, near the close of the 
War of the Rebellion, to raise money to pay 
bounties to volunteers to serve in the place 



01^ CAMDEN, NDW JI:RSEY. 59 

of its members who might be drafted for the 
army, The Camden City Dispensary had its 
origin. At Lee's surrender, in 1865, that 
Association had in its treasury a balance 
which it resolved should be used for charity. 
Col. Thomas McKeen, its treasurer, strongly 
urged that the money be given for the estab- 
lishment of a dispensary, and after consulta- 
tion with members of The Camden County 
Medical Society that was decided to be done. 
A committee of the Association, aided by one 
of the Medical Society, purchased the Perse- 
verance Hose House, then standing on the 
east side of Third street, below Market street. 
The Camden City Dispensary was incorpo- 
rated February 5th, 1867. It received from 
that draft fund $3,776.94 and carried on its 
good work in the old hose house until that 
was sold in 1890, when the Dispensary was 
moved to its present building. No. 725 Fed- 
eral street, which it built in 1891 and where, 
aided by bequests, and an annual appropria- 
tion from City Council, it freely administers 
to all needing its aid. 

The Camden Home for Friendless Children 
was incorporated April 6th, 1865, and was 
formally opened on May 30th, 1865. The first 
child was admitted May 8th, 1865. The West 
Jersey Orphanage for Destitute Colored Chil- 
dren was incorporated February 17th, 1874, 
and opened January 20th, 1875. Each of 
those charities since its opening has unostenta- 
tiously carried on its good work. 



60 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

Several dwelling houses in Camden are over 
one hundred years old. The old yellow house 
at Point and Erie streets, built in 1734, as the 
stone in its gable end mutely testifies, was the 
headquarters of the British General Aber- 
crombie while Philadelphia was occupied by 
the British during the Revolutionary War. 
The one-and-a-half-story stone house occupied 
by the Pyne Poynt Library is probably older" 
than that old yellow house, but there is no rec- 
ord of the date of its erection. The old Kaighin 
homestead, at the southeast corner of Second 
and Sycamore streets, originally two stories 
high in its centre with a one-story wing at each 
end, with its length parallel with the river, was 
built between 1700 and 17 10 of bricks brought 
from England. Much older than a century is 
the old stone farm house on the river bank 
just below Jasper street, the birthplace of Isaac 
Mickle, whose "Reminiscences of Old Glouces- 
ter" has been truly said have been written 
"With a wealth of erudition and classic allusion 
that makes the book to this day one of the 
most readable contributions to our local his- 
tory."' 

An interesting memento of a long past is the 
hexagonal mile stone in front of St. Jolm's 
Protestant Episcopal Church, at the curbstone 
on Broadway, just above Roy den street. Good 
taste has kept and it is to be hoped long will 
keep it, where it was first set, then on the 
"Woodbury road" in front of a farm field. 

T William Netsou's address before N. J. Historical Society, May 
16, 1895. 




OLD MILE STONE 



01^ CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 6 1 

The inscription on it, cut long before our town 
was known as Camden, is : 

"i Mile to Coop's Fy's 
to Salem." 

The distance to Salem has become obliter- 
ated, but the rest of its lettering is clear. 

The first Camden county courts were held 
in the old city court house on Federal street. 
Small and homely in its lack of any architec- 
tural merit, as great a contrast to the chaste 
charm of our present beautiful Court House 
as it is possible for any building to be, it an- 
swered the purpose for a decade, or until the 
county built the old Court House on Broad- 
way, the corner-stone of which was laid on 
June 26th, 1852, and which was torn down in 
1903 to make room for the present one, the 
corner-stone of which was laid on August i8th, 
1904, and the beauty and harmony of whose 
perfect dome and every outline is a continued 
joy to view. 

New Jersey, happily not a land of earth- 
quakes, is not without their experience. Smith, 
in his "History of New Jersey." states that, in 
November, 1726, a small one was felt between 
the hours of ten and eleven at night; that on 
September 5th, 1732, "about noon a small 
shock of earthcjuake was felt" ; that on Decem- 
ber 7th, 1737, "at night was a large shock of 
earthquake, accompanied with a remarkable 
rumbling noise ; people waked in their beds, the 
doors flew open, bricks fell from the chimneys, 
the consternation was serious, but happily no 



62 HISTORICAIv SKETCH 

great damage ensued"; and that November 
i8th, 1755, "at four o'clock in the morning, 
was a considerable shock of an earthquake, 
which lasted about two minutes. * * * j^ 
did not begin with so much of a rumbling 
noise as that in 1737, but was thought not to 
fall short in the concussion." One hundred 
and twenty-nine years after Smith's last rec- 
ord Camden experienced an earthquake. It 
came on Sunday afternoon, August loth, 1884, 
a clear day, about ten or twelve minutes past 
two o'clock, without rumble or other warning, 
in three distinct tremors, the last lighter than 
the first two and was over in a few seconds. 
The walls of strong stone houses shook per- 
ceptibly and the bells in large brick houses 
rang. People walking along the street appear- 
ed not to notice it, but to many within well- 
built houses the sensation of irresistible tremb- 
ling of floors and distinct shaking of stout 
walls gave a feeling of instability never before 
experienced. The earthquake was very gen- 
eral over the Eastern United States, toppling 
over chimneys, but doing little other damage. 

A year afterwards, on Monday, August 3d, 
1885, ^ terrible wind cyclone, twice crossing 
the Delaware, swept over Camden between the 
river and Sixth street, from Kaighn's Point 
to Cooper's Point, killing five persons and seri- 
ously wounding over thirty others, unroofing 
houses, schools, churches and buildings of 
every kind, and demolishing large parts of 
their walls. It followed a rain of several 
hours, but did not last more than five minutes, 




«) nl 



_/ — 
— V 



I E 



01^ CAMDKN, NEW JERSEY. 63 

yet in that time it was estimated that, in addi- 
tion to the deaths and wounding of many peo- 
ple, the loss to property amounted to from a 
half a million to a million of dollars. As it 
passed his shipyard at Kaighn's Point, John 
H. Dialogue saw a huge ball of fire, looking to 
him to be ten feet in diameter, accompany the 
storm and explode about two hundred and fifty 
yards north of him with a report that shook 
the foundations of the buildings in his ship- 
yard. At the time the sky eastward of the 
narrow belt of the cyclone was unusually bright 
with a rainbow effect. 

The most prominent feature in the view 
over the Delaware from Camden's shore for 
more than a century prior to its removal by 
the United States Government, in 1894, in its 
improvement of the channel of the river, was 
Windmill Island, extending, at its removal, 
from about opposite Berkley street to about 
opposite Arch street, with bars at each end, 
extending southward to Line street and 
northward to nearly opposite Linden street, 
and originally to the fast land at Cooper's 
Point. Shown as a bar in 1681 on Holm's 
map of the Delaware river, it had grown to 
be a firm island in the middle of the next cen- 
tury, when John Harding built on it a wind- 
mill, whence its name. And, later, when 
Joseph Wright, of Philadelphia, in 1786, 
established his ferry from Robert Wain's 
wharf below the drawbridge over Dock creek 
(now Dock street), Philadelphia, to Camden, 
he made on the island a landing where he 



64 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

erected a half-way house and pubHshed that 
"Passengers would alwa)'s meet with hearty 
welcome and a hospitable fire in the cold sea- 
son to warm and refresh themselves while 
waiting for an opportunity of evading those 
large fields of ice which generally float up and 
down with the tide and obstruct the passage 
during winter." A graphic glimpse of the 
difficulty besetting the crossing of the Dela- 
ware in the open wherries when the cold was 
not severe enough to so freeze it as to enable 
it to be crossed on the ice. A difficulty inten- 
sified in stormy weather when umbrellas, were 
they then used, could not have been raised lest 
they impede the boats. Edward Sharp, in 
1820, tried to solve the problem of a better 
crossing of the river by a bridge to be built 
from Camden to the island, so that onl}^ the 
narrow channel between it and Philadelphia 
would have to be crossed by a ferry. In his 
furtherance thereof he laid out Bridge avenue 
one hundred feet wide on his plan of the con- 
tinuation of "Camden Village," from which 
his bridge, that, from want of financial aid, 
never materialized, was to start. When the 
Camden and Am1)oy Railroad was built, and 
its Philadelphia landing fixed at the foot of 
Walnut street, near the location, in 1786, of 
Joseph Wright's ferry landing, the island was 
such an impediment to the crossing of the 
river by its boats, that the company procured 
from the Pennsylvania Legislature authority 
to cut a canal through it. Begun in 1837, 
finished in 1838, the canal was kept open so 








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'X.4-^^ 



WALT WHITMANS TOMB 



OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 65 

long as the island remained in the river. In 
the nineteenth century, Thomas Smith be- 
came the owner of the northern end of the 
island, and he and his heirs held the ownership 
and kept there a public garden until within a 
few years of its removal, so that it became 
commonly called Smith's Island during all 
the latter years of its existence. 

Besides Camden's association with Wash- 
ington, Franklin, Wayne and Pulaski, there is 
linked wuth its history the names of four other 
noted men of widely-different fame. 

The great Indian chief, Tammany, patron 
saint of that powerful organization of the New 
York City Democracy bearing his name, died 
on Pea Shore, according to a tradition so 
firmly fixed that it is but emphasized in the 
location, by the Tammany Fishing Club, for 
many years of its club house there, now within 
the city limits. Until shortly before the nine- 
teenth century a forest stood along the Dela- 
ware River, between Bridge avenue and Line 
street, called by a name singularly like Tam- 
many's woods.' The eccentric Colonel David 
Crockett, then a Representative in Congress 
from Kentucky, stopped at Camden on his 
way to Washington in 1831 or 1832, staying 
at the hotel of Isaiah Toy, afterwards and 
until it was torn down, in 1882, well known 
as Parsons' Hotel, which stood on the north 
side of Federal street just above Front street, 
then close to the ferry landing. While there 
Crockett went with some friends to a shooting 

I Mickle, pp. 19, 46. 
5 



66 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

match held near the present Court House, 
then in full view of the Camden and Amboy 
(now Pennsylvania) Railroad. As he was 
shooting, the first locomotive of that road 
passed. Gazing at it in wonder he exclaimed, 
"Hell in harness !" The distinguished orni- 
thologist, John James Audubon, lived for a 
short time in a small two-and-a-half story 
brick house that stood on the south side of 
Cooper street, nearly opposite Friends' ave- 
nue, and was torn down in 1901. Walt Whit- 
man's home in Camden for the last nineteen 
year of his life, from 1873 to 1892, has made 
it known and linked its name with his fame, 
wherever his "Leaves of Grass" is read. His 
plain old-fashioned two-story frame house, 
No. 328 Mickle street, and his tomb, in beau- 
tiful Harleigh Cemetery, designed by himself, 
striking in its massive simplicity, are the two 
points of interest sought by all his admirers 
visiting Camden. 




WALT WHITMAN'S HOME 



Of CAMDEN^ NEW JERSEY. 6/ 



Ci^apter 4 

Around Camden cling aboriginal legend and 
pioneer romance enriching her story of the 
past. 

David Peterson De Vries, the Dutch com- 
mander, who first came to New Jersey in 1631, 
with a colony of thirty-four Dutch settlers, left 
them at Fort Nassau (near Gloucester Point), 
and returned to Holland. During his absence, 
the colonists raised over the fort his standard, 
which an Indian stole and for which they hung 
him. That, with outrages committed on the 
Indian wives, so exasperated the Indians that 
they massacred the whole Dutch settlement, 
and when De Vries returned, in 1632, he found 
no sign of his colonists except their bones. 
The Indians charged with the massacre con- 
fessed it with much pretended penitence. De 
Vries, being in sore need of food, and in no 
condition to punish them, made a new treaty 
with them for a supply of venison and corn. 
Pretending to fulfill their ap-reement the In- 
dians decoyed De Vries from Fort Nassau and 
up Timmerkill (Cooper's Creek) with his 
vessel and crew on the pretence that on that 
stream provision was stored. Sailing up the 
creek he came to anchor near Red Hill, or 
Ward's Mount, in Forest Hill Park. In the 
hearing of a young Indian mother, whom they 
thought slept, the Indians planned to waylay 
and slay the Dutch when they landed. The 
young mother, of unknown name, in her quick- 



68 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

witted mercy and brave determination to save 
the palefaces from the doom designed for 
them, rivalled Pocahontas, and so soon as the 
conference of the chiefs ended, at the risk of 
her life, went in the night to the creek, 
paddled in a canoe to De Vries' vessel and 
told him of the plot. So warned, he sailed 
back at once to Fort Nassau to find that, ex- 
pecting his slaughter up the creek, the Indians 
were in possession of the empty fort. Con- 
cealing their surprise they came in their 
canoes and surrounded his vessel. Deeming it 
prudent not to attack them, De Vries said to 
them the Great Spirit had told him of their 
treachery, and before he was directed to use 
on them the thunder of his swivel gun they 
had better leave. They did so, and De Vries 
soon after sailed out of the Delaware, aban- 
donilig the effort of the Dutch to colonize New 
Jersey.' A well-told story, founded on this 
incident, entitled "Mahala, a Legend of New 
Jersey," was published in Miss Leslie's Mag- 
azine in 1843, ^^^ reprinted in the West Jer- 
sey Press, on March ist. 1876. 

Though Elizabeth Haddon's home, after 
emigrating to New Jersey, was first at Coles' 
Landing on Cooper's Creek, and afterwards at 
Haddonfield. her close social and religious 
association with Camden's first settlers, she and 
they alike worshipping in the same Friends' 
log meeting-house at what is now West 
Collingswood railroad station, and her niece 
Mary Estaugh marrying Joseph Kaighin, son 
of John Kaighin. the emigrant, causes her 

I Gordon's History of New Jersey, p. 9. 



OP* CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 69 

romance to so linger about their lives as to 
justify its mention as fittingly a part of Cam- 
den's story. Read in Lydia Maria Childs' 
"Tale of the Youthful Emigrant" how John 
Estaugh, a young minister on a religious visit 
from England to America, found favor in her 
sight; how by simple device she detained him 
behind the others of the cavalcade of Friends, 
on their way to Salem Quarterly Meeting, and 
with all maidenly modesty confessed to him 
in Friendly phraseology her love for him ; how 
he, poor, wnth her young, beautiful and rich, 
blushing as she offered herself was coy, claim- 
ing that he came solely on a religious visit 
from which that subject might distract his 
mind; how he held his advantage by saying, 
"When I have discharged the duties of my 
mission we will speak farther" ; how nothing 
more was then said by them on that nearest 
to their hearts and John returned to England, 
and how, when away from her, he quickly ap- 
preciated what he was missing and returned 
the following fall and married her. Then read 
Longfellow's poem "Elizabeth," and there will 
be told the legend which has gathered as a halo 
around Elizabeth Haddon's life, clinging too 
closely for criticism to dissipate and brighter 
growing with the passing years. 

No more prosaic part of Camden can now 
be found than the crossing of the railroad over 
Federal and Twelfth streets. But at the com- 
mencement of the Eighteenth century it was 
an attractive spot, as romantic a Gretna Green 
as could well be chosen. Near there the pub- 
lic road from Gloucester to Burlington, cross- 



70 HISTORICAL SKETCH 

ing Cooper's Creek at Spicer's Ferry, met the 
roads from the two Cooper's Ferries under the 
tall pine forest covering the land for many an 
acre thereabout. Very early one day in the 
year 1707, Sarah Eckley, a rich young Friend 
of Philadelphia, and Colonel Daniel Coxe. a 
young Church of England man on the staff 
of Lord Cornbury, Governor of New Jersey, 
crossed the Delaware and were married by the 
Lord's chaplain ''between two and three in the 
morning.'" The meeting of those roads where 
Cooper street now ends has been located as the 
place "on the Jersey Side" where that marriage 
took place, upon the probability that Colonel 
Coxe. knowing that Lord Cornbury, accom- 
panied by his chaplain, would then be on his 
return to Burlington, from holding court at 
Gloucester, planned to intercept him as if by 
accident where the roads from the Cooper's 
Ferries entered the King's Highway. Imag- 
ination may easily bring back the picturesque 
sight — the tall pine trees, the ground co^^red 
with their needles, the yet dark of night. Lord 
Cornbury and attendants, Indians in silent 
wonder at the unfamiliar ceremony, the young 
couple before the chaplain, and the glow of 
the wood fire through the deep forest casting 
over all its illumination. Colonel Coxe, after 
his romantic marriage, had his home in Bur- 
lington, was Governor of New Jersey, and 
studying law became a judge of the Supreme 
Court of the State, continuing so until his 
death, in 1739. "He lived," says Judge Field, 

I Watson's Annals. 



OF CAMDI^N, NEW JE;RSKY. J I 

"to enjoy the confidence and respect of the 
community, and his judicial duties appear to 
have been discharged with abiHty and integ- 
rity." He was the originator of the plan of 
union of the North American Colonies after- 
wards suggested by Franklin, called the "Al- 
bany Plan of Union," proposing it in a pam- 
phlet he issued to induce settlers to remove to 
New Jersey. His sister, who was said to have 
promoted his runaway match with the young 
Quaker, Sarah Eckley, was the wife of Wil- 
liam Trent, then of Philadelphia, who later 
purchased from Mahlon Stacy the land where- 
on the city of Trenton is now built, moved 
there, gave it his name and, though not a law- 
yer, became Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court of New Jersey. 

Such, brokenly told, is Camden's story of 
the past. To-day, with a territory of some 
twelve square miles, with a population of 
93,000, and growing steadily, it is the fourth 
city in New Jersey. Never so vigorous as 
now, its well-paved streets, its growing parks, 
its pure water, with the accompaniment, good 
health, its excellent free schools, its liberal free 
libraries, its fine hospital, may well cause its 
people to work to make its motto, virius et in- 
dustria, a reality and Camden citizenship to be 
so prized by its inhabitants that, adapting the 
toast of the old Scotch town of Ayr, they shall 
say: 

Here's to auld Camden wham ne'er a tow^n 

surpasses 
For honest men and bonnie lasses. 



INDEX. 

Page. 

Academy, Camden 54, 55 

Arms, Coat of 49 

Arnold, Richard 9 

Audubon, John James 66 

Banks 32, 33, 51 

Baptist Church 30 

Bridge, Delaware 64 

British occupancy 21 

Building and loan associations 43 

Camden County 41 

Camden, Earl of 19 

Cemeteries 54 

Children, Friendless 59 

City Hall 57 

Civil War 45 

Cooper Hospital 56 

Cooper, William 9 

Cooper's Creek 67 

Cooper's Ferries 29, 38 

Cooper's pine field 28 

Cooper's Point 9 

County lines 41 

County seat 41, 42 

Court houses 13, 43, 61 

Coxe, Governor 70 

Crockett, David 65 

Cyclone 62 

De La Warr, Lord 7 

Delaware River 7, 64 

Democrats 41 

De Vries (Dutch Commander) 7, 67 

Diamond Cottage 29 

Dispensary 59 

Dutch 7, 67 

Earl of Camden 19 

Earthquakes 61 

Election, first city 36 

Estaugh, John 69 

Ferries 14, 15, 30, 31, 32 

Fire department • 47 

Fire insurance 39 

Franklin, Benjamin 25 

Friends' meeting lli 30 

Gas supply 44 

Gloucester County, Origin of 12 



74 INDKX. 

Page. 

Haddon, Elizabeth 17, 69 

Haddonfield 34 

Incorporation 34 

Indians 10, 67 

Jail 38 

Jones, Paul 27 

Kaighin, John 16 

Kaighn School 55 

Kaighn's Point 16, 17, 30 

Libraries 47 

Line Ditch 18 

Mahala, a legend 68 

Market houses 40 

Mickle, Archibald 16 

Mickle, Isaac 60 

Mile Stone 60, 61 

Mulford, Dr. Isaac S 45 

New Jersey, Burning of Ferryboat 44 

Newton Creek 18 

Newton Township 16. 34 

Orphanage, West Jersey 59 

Parsons' Hotel 65 

Pea Shore 65 

Post Office 38 

Princeton College Trustees 24 

Pulaski, Count 24 

Pyne Poynt 9 

Railroad, first 39 

Republicans 51 

Schools 54, 55 

Smith's Island 65 

Starr, Jesse W 57 

Steamboats 30, 31, 32 

Stockton, Annexation of 49 

Street cars 47 

Streets, as first named 20 

Swedes 7 

Tammany, Chief 66 

Town hall, first 38 

Town meeting 34 

Town plot, first 19 

Trent, William 71 

Union Army Volunteers — s^ 46 

Washington, George t 26 

Water supply i 44, 53 

Wayne, General Anthony^..^^.' 22, 23 

Wedding in forest 1....".' / 70 

Whitman, Walt 66 

Windmill Island , 28. 63 



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